Matthew J. MacVeigh

SEO articles abound in the recent days of improving Internet content, and as many internet entrepreneurs and web site enthusiasts are finding, including quality content on a web site separates the haves from the have-nots.

The reverse pyramid style of writing is best when writing quality content for web sites. The reverse pyramid is the journalistic style of placing the most important topics toward the beginning of an article or section of copy, and ending with either the least important or least relevant topics.

Many SEO articles regarding optimizing your pages will also give important tips for creating web content: highlight keywords, make bulleted lists, keep headlines relevant, use short paragraphs and cut word counts in half.

In a 1997 study by Jakob Nielsen and John Morkes, 79 percent of the people tested scanned pages, while only 16 percent read word-for-word. In a nutshell, this means that if selling tires, you wouldn’t fill a page with contect about tire dealers in Houston. Search engine optimization copy would instead focus on the tires you sell and how easy it is to buy them on the web site.

Concise, relevant copy is one of the most important aspects of SEO writing, however sentence construction, descriptive copy and knowledgeable discourse are also three facets that will put the amateur web designer on par with the most seasoned company SEO. Houston tire dealers would be much more apt to visit and return to a site that consisely and directly referenced industry experts speaking about market trends in the tire industry than they would a web site that had no focus and enticed readers by jumping from the subject of rubbber bands to getting rid of that pesky spare tire around your waist.

Web columnist and teacher Jean Baker writes, “…beyond the basics, go with a strong beginning and be sure you are writing for the media you’ve chosen. Make sure you’ve got a newsworthy topic concerning information the reader will care about hearing.” Baker sums it up perfectly in saying a web copywriter must balance who the site’s audience is as well as how focused the copy needs to be in order to be relevant to a web site without being too basic.

Any search engine optimization copywriter, or writer in any city for that matter, will tell you that most web sites also try to adhere to the three click rule. If a web site user can’t get done what they need to do in three clicks, they will leave your site. Though this isn’t a hard and fast rule, it should be kept in mind. With more than 2.5 billion documents in the Internet and increasing by 7.5 million a day, web surfers want to get in and out of a site quickly and on with their session. Plus most surfers can only remember about seven bits of information from any one session.  Focusing on your information structure and making sure it is optimized for your users success is always a good idea for any company SEO. Tire dealers, or any customer/retailer for that matter, will thank you for it.